21 posts tagged with "interview"

What is your role in the company?

Hi! My name is Nicolas Arqueros. I’m one of the co-founders of dcSpark and also a core contributor to the Milkomeda Protocol.

Hey, Nicolas Arqueros, happy to connect today and learn more about the Milkomeda project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Following Metcalfe's law, tech products primarily accrue value based on the size of their network. This means that superior technology can give a slight edge but does not in itself guarantee a definitive win against established competitors. Promising cryptocurrency projects are part of this set of tech products, thus it is necessary to achieve a critical adoption growth trajectory to come out ahead over the long term.

Milkomeda is a protocol that gives EVM capabilities to non-EVM Blockchains. In practical terms, it allows the deployment of smart contracts from Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart-Chain, and multiple other chains, to chains that wouldn’t support it. Developers are at the core of making the visions of these businesses possible, and as such, having access to a large pool of developers is one of the vital points for ecosystem success.

For the April Spotlight Article, we interviewed Long Nguyen, the co-founder of Minswap.

Hey Long! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Minswap project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Minswap is a community-centric decentralized exchange on Cardano. With no venture capital funding or private investment, we aim to become the best DEX for anyone to buy and sell their Cardano native tokens, and earn passive income via yield farming and staking.

For the March Spotlight Article, we interviewed , the co-founder and Cheif Operating Officer at Lovelace Academy. Lovelace Academy is a blockchain education platform to streamline your development journey with Cardano and Web3.

Hey Shweta! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Lovelace Academy platform! Can you tell us more about the platform and the problem you were addressing? Where are there gaps in the education space?

Lovelace Academy is a blockchain education platform that aims to make it easier for our learners to navigate the developer ecosystem, understand key concepts and learn best practices while building on Cardano. Currently, no platforms guide newcomers on the "Why" and "How" to build on Cardano. So we are trying to be a one-stop platform to onboard people on Cardano.

For the February Spotlight Article, we interviewed Shahaf, one of the founders and CEO at COTI. COTI is an enterprise-grade fintech platform that empowers organizations to build their payment solution and digitize any currency to save time and money.

Hey Shahaf! Happy to connect today and learn more about the COTI project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Thanks for having me! In a nutshell, COTI is a financial technology company that uses the blockchain to solve traditional banking problems. COTI’s goal is to meet the challenges of both centralized and decentralized finance (DeFi) such as fees, latency, global inclusion, risk, clogging, and complexity.

COTI will solve these challenges by introducing a new type of DAG-based base protocol and infrastructure that is scalable, fast, private, inclusive, low cost, and optimized for finance.

For the January edition of the Spotlight Article, we interviewed Robert Hever, COO / Co-Founder, and Damon Zwarich, CMO / Co-Founder from Charli3.

Hey Robert and Damon! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Charli3 project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Charli3 is a decentralized oracle solution natively built in Haskell / on the PAB (Plutus Application Backend). We held our Initial DEX Offering in April 2021 and set out to solve the following three problems.

1. General oracle problem: Smart contract solutions need accurate, reliable, secure, and trusted off-chain data that fit their requirements (e.g., for speed). There is a need for aggregation of data to provide a trusted source to the chain (e.g., many single sources with conflicting values).

2. Cardano problem: There are no blockchain agnostic solutions. The current solutions are paired with network lag and high update fees. The barrier of entry to support launching Cardano projects is that the oracles must be built from scratch, natively with Haskell/Plutus code.

3. Decentralization problem: We see centralized oracle solutions, where one party is the governing authority on who gets what data and from where. We see centralization as part of the current financial system’s problem. We hope to solve that problem by being as “hands-off” as possible with our ecosystem solution.

For the December edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed Josef from ADApools.

Hey Josef! Happy to connect today and learn more about the ADApools project! Can you tell us more about the founding of the project and the problem you were addressing?

Hi, thanks for the invitation! It started in the early days of ITN when there was no list of pools with their performance and no way to compare. I like to process open data. Such a tool was completely missing on the market. So it was such a logical evolution and fun. Over time, as Jormungandr added more data, ADApools eventually grew into a serious project. So the goal was to create a feature-rich comparison tool, which, looking at it today, has been achieved.

For the November edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Alessandro, the creator of the Nami Wallet, co-founder of SpaceBudz, and Cardano stake pool operator.

Hey Alessandro! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Nami Wallet project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hey, for sure! Nami is a browser-based wallet extension with a focus on simplicity and a great user experience. While Nami seems minimal at first glance, it’s very powerful since you can connect the wallet to any website and let the user interact with decentralized applications (dApps). The problem we try to tackle here with Nami is to interact with Cardano in a broader way and onboard users that may not have been in crypto long.

For the October edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed Anthony, the CFO of Tokhun.

Hey Anthony! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Tokhun project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Tokhun is a smart contract-driven NFT platform built on the Cardano blockchain. When creating Tokhun, we wanted to provide CNFT artists with a space to create, display, and sell their artwork.

For the September edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Kate, the senior marketing manager at NOWPayments.

Hey Kate! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NOWPayments project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hi, happy to answer your questions!

NOWPayments was founded in 2019 by the team behind ChangeNOW, a leading crypto exchange service. NOWPayments remains close partners with ChangeNOW but is fully independent and has its own team.

The idea of NOWPayments was to help spread mass adoption by making it easy to use crypto daily. The challenges merchants face when deciding if they should accept crypto are:

• Volatility.
• Lack of knowledge about crypto basics.
• Lack of means to accept on popular e-commerce platforms.
• The need to withdraw to fiat.

We try to help solve each of these by offering a fixed-rate option and supporting conversion to stablecoins. In addition, we continue developing plugins that can be integrated with major e-commerce platforms. We also have a fiat conversion option, although we hope it won’t be needed in the future if everyone can use crypto everywhere. That is why we are targeting all industries: e-commerce, services, traveling, gaming, tech, etc. Crypto is ubiquitous.

For the August edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Adam Dean, the primary developer of Mercury for WooCommerce.

Hey Adam! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Mercury for WooCommerce project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

With Cardano Mercury for WooCommerce, my goal was to make a simple and accessible solution to bridge traditional e-commerce with the Cardano Blockchain. WooCommerce is one of the largest open-source e-commerce platforms in the industry. So it was only natural to create a similarly open-source, fee-free payment gateway to bridge Cardano to WooCommerce. One of the most significant barriers to entry in the cryptocurrency industry is the need to trade back and forth between fiat and crypto. Mercury aims to eliminate that friction point by allowing merchants and shoppers to transact directly with one another with the currency of the future.